Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, December 12, 2010

As regular readers will know, the one thing that still gets my goat here is the lack of consideration for others. However, I’ve been here long enough to know this comes in at least three categories. The first (and worst) of these is the general lack of consideration for everyone, e.g. when someone parks their car across a zebra crossing. The second is when someone acts as though you aren’t there – as today when I was ordering my usual Sunday lunch and a woman from the next table got up and started talking to the waiter about her order. And the third – and least annoying – category is of the person who demonstrates the Spanish lack of antennae by doing something that isn’t meant to affect you but does. Like the lady yesterday who started reading the paper in front of me at the bar. My guess is that, if she thought about this at all, she figured that, like her, I was waiting to pay a bill at the counter. Needless to say, when I pointed out – politely – that I was actually reading the paper she was turning the pages of, she became all flustered and apologised like only the Spanish can. Thought-less but not as thoughtless as the earlier examples. 

The front page of the Business Section of El Pais today had a large foto of Mrs Merkel, with the by-line “The Boss of Europe”. Inside, an editorial took the currently fashionable line that the Germans don’t seem to understand what Europe is all about. That Mrs Merkel might be accountable to hardworking Germans fed up of subsidising other, shall we say, ‘less-productive’ Europeans didn’t rate a mention, of course.

Returning to the subject of education in the UK . . . Given what I wrote the other night, I wasn’t surprised to read today: that “The raw data reveals pupils in private schools are streets ahead of their state-school peers. The average reading score of a privately educated teenager in the UK is 553, while it is 492 for a state-educated pupil. (The OECD average last year was 493 points.)”. I can’t help wondering whether things have now gone so far in the UK that state education is a lost cause, regardless of what the present government tries to do about the failure of the last ten years of massively increased expenditure to reap rewards.

As for Wikileaks . . .  I find myself in sympathy with this trenchant view. Which distances me from The Guardian, I suspect . . .

Finally . . .  My daughter has now posted Chapter 14 out of 19 of her novel “The Second Death of Juan La Roca.” Click here for this. And for all the others.

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